The Land of Cancer

Posted on May 7, 2003 in Book of Days North Carolina

Note: This is twenty-second in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Some things you’ll never forget..

I don’t know where I first heard the song Smoke gets in your eyes. It’s one of those that people whistle to you when they think you’ve whined enough and they want to restore the feel of the party to the gathering in which you’ve sobbed.

I remember the tune in connection with the parties we used to have at the house we called The Wits End, in Durham, North Carolina, just two blocks down the street and a block over from the stadium where the Bulls played — just behind the two long rows of brick tobacco warehouses which stank at summer’s end with the new harvest of bright leaf, the chaw that made George Washington Duke rich and gave a reason for the town of Durham to be born five years after Generals Sherman and Johnston signed a peace at a tiny farmhouse amid the soil-killing tobacco fields.

Durham made its money off cancer and was proud of the fact. The barns made for tourist attractions. One was converted into a shopping center with a bookstore, a new age massage practitioner, a commercialized folk art store, and similar trash shops.

It’s the red of the sun shining on those barns in the late afternoon that I recall, a red that wasn’t quite the color of the blood that smokers coughed up; nor the color of the “red delicious” apples — they weren’t delicious — that they sold at the A&P across the street from Duke University.

I remember the crushed chain link fence that separated our desolate backyard and parking area from the verdant, mostly untended grass of a city park. Parks in North Carolina didn’t need caretakers except to mow them. They didn’t require sprinkling systems because the clouds dumped cargo imported from the Pacific Ocean several times every summer. It was an alien place for a California bred in the lands of aqueducts, tract houses, and earnest, frequent waterings of the front lawns….

[To be continued….Time was up in the group. But it will be continued!]

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This blog by Donna could have been written for today’s meme.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about a cold snap..